There were other reviews. The American Whig Review informed its readers that Olmsted was the author of the earlier “A Voice from the Sea” and praised his “natural and unprejudiced impressions.” Cummings Evening Bulletin of Philadelphia was brief but complimentary: “our farmer observes closely and writes spiritedly.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine called the book “eminently popular, in the true sense of the term,” and concluded that it “cannot fail to be a favorite with the great mass of readers.” The Horticulturist ran a review of the second volume that was as fulsome in its praise as the first review: “His sketches of landscape, and of particular scenes and objects in the landscape, exhibit such glowing warmth of feeling, such a practical knowledge, as we would only expect in one exclusively devoted to the study of nature.” Like the earlier review, this one quoted at length from the book.
Whether Downing himself wrote The Horticulturist’s review of the first volume of Walks and Talks is not known, but he did not write the second. Three months before the second volume of Olmsted’s book appeared, Downing drowned in a tragic Hudson River steamboat accident that claimed seventy lives. He was only thirty-six, but was America’s best-known professional landscape gardener. His plan for transforming the area between the Capitol and the Washington Monument into a “national park” had recently been approved by Congress. Had he lived, he would undoubtedly have been chosen to design and build New York’s Central Park, a project that he had so vocally supported. Little could Olmsted imagine the effect of Downing’s death on his own career. Sorrowfully—and gratefully—he dedicated the second volume of his book to the man who had both inspired and assisted him.
* * *
1. During the nineteenth century, tuberculosis was known as the “great white plague” and reached epidemic proportions in America, as it did in Europe. Yet while there was no cure, the course of the disease was uncertain: Thoreau died of tuberculosis at forty-four; Emerson at seventy-eight.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Charley Brace Intervenes
ALL THE TIME that Olmsted was becoming engaged—and unengaged—to Emily Perkins, and writing, Charles Brace was in Europe. After separating from Frederick and John in Glasgow and returning to Germany, he spent the winter in Berlin, learning German and studying. In the spring of 1851, he decided to set out for Hungary. He was supporting himself as a correspondent for several American newspapers, and Hungary, which only three years earlier had waged an unsuccessful war of independence against its Austrian occupier, was a subject of popular interest. Olmsted encouraged his friend. “If you could get to Hungary and really know the people, take an unprejudiced view of their condition and character, learn what really is their revolutionary impulse,” he wrote, “it would be most interesting and valuable.” Following visits to Prague and Vienna, Brace arrived in Hungary. He enjoyed a pleasant two weeks of Magyar hospitality. While he was touring Transylvania, the Austrian police suddenly placed him under arrest. He was charged with having subversive material in his possession, and with being an emissary of Hungarian patriots abroad. The charges were nominally true—he did have a revolutionary pamphlet, as well as a letter of introduction from a Hungarian exile. The United States had been the only government to formally recognize the short-lived Hungarian republic, and Americans were known to be sympathetic to the revolutionary cause.
The idea of Charley Brace as a spy seemed ludicrous to his friends at home, who assumed it was all a simple misunderstanding. “I anticipate your most interesting letters now, describing Austrian prison discipline—size of your cell, weight of your chain, etc.,” joked Olmsted in a letter, trying to lift his friend’s spirits. But it was no joke. Brace was imprisoned for five weeks. He was put on trial—thirteen times—and finally released from prison thanks to the intercession of the American chargé d’affaires. Returning to Vienna, he found himself under police surveillance and soon felt obliged to leave the country. He returned to America via Belfast, where he paid court to Letitia Neill.
Brace returned to New York on December 13, 1851. Given the American interest in Hungary, he gave several public lectures, denouncing “oppression and tyranny.” He also wrote a book about his Transylvanian adventure. Hungary in 1851: with an Experience of the Austrian Police garnered favorable reviews, both in England and America. But writing was not the career he sought; nor was he interested in becoming a conventional clergyman. He turned his attention to social work among New York’s poor, particularly the city’s vagrant boys. In 1853 he helped to establish the Children’s Aid Society, of which he was appointed the chief executive officer. At twenty-seven, Charles Loring Brace had found his life work. This upright, selfless man would successfully direct the Society in its good works for the next thirty-seven years.
Hungary in 1851 was published only two months after the first volume of Walks and Talks. Of the two books, Brace’s was more exciting—espionage and imprisonment made for a more dramatic story than tramping the English countryside. The two thousand copies of the first edition sold quickly, more quickly than Walks and Talks. Brace’s success was all the more striking given the speed with which he had written the book, and given his evident lack of interest in pursuing a literary career. But if Olmsted was chagrined, he did not show it. He was happy to have Brace home. Charles Brace was his dearest friend—other than his brother. Olmsted and Brace’s friendship found its chief expression in conversation—they loved to talk, and not just to talk, but to argue. In a letter to Kingsbury, written in the fall of 1848, Brace described a boisterous Sunday visit to Tosomock Farm.
A wild stormy day and we spent it at home. A sea-beach in a storm is no unfit place for worship, is it? But the amount of talking done upon that visit! One steady stream from six o’clock Saturday night till twelve, beginning next day, and going on till about twelve the next night, interrupted only by meals and some insane walks on the beach! And this not like ours together, easy, discursive, varied, but a torrent of fierce argument, mixed with divers oaths on Fred’s part, and abuse on both! However I must say Fred is getting to argue with the utmost keenness,—a regular Dr. Taylor mind in its analytic power! But what is queerest, never able to exercise that power except in discussion! He is another Taylorite in his virtue theory. I shouldn’t be surprised if he turned out something rather remarkable among men.
The Dr.Taylor that Brace referred to was Nathaniel Taylor, a Yale theologian who was a famous debater. Religion was one of the subjects that Brace and Olmsted discussed. The idealistic but practical Brace had come to espouse an activist form of Christianity, rooted in good deeds rather than piety and prayer. Olmsted, by this time, had lost most of his interest in formal religion. Describing another Sunday Staten Island visit to Kingsbury, Brace wrote, “It does not mean, I am almost sorry to say, much going to church.” But he added, “Perhaps no day in the year is more intellectual than this Sunday of ours. There is earnest talk all day long on the great problems of life and eternity; not flippant discussion, or prize matches between intellects, but, as I do believe, a serious and rational investigation.” The two agreed on many things—Olmsted, too, thought that helping others was the highest calling, although his friend could not help noticing that Olmsted appeared in no hurry to pursue it.
If religion was the subject of “earnest talk,” then what accounted for the “torrent of fierce argument”? It was slavery. By the mid-1800s, slavery had become the most contentious political question of the day. Shortly after the turn of the century, the African slave trade had been prohibited (although it continued illicitly), and all the Northern states had either abolished slave-owning or adopted measures to gradually eradicate it. But slavery did not die out. Because of the widespread adoption of Whitney’s mechanical cotton gin (invented in 1793), cotton cultivation in the Southern states became highly profitable. Since cotton plantations depended on slave labor, the demand for slaves went up. Instead of dying a natural death, as many of the Founding Fathers had hoped, slavery revived. Between 1800 and 1850, the slave population of the
United States went from less than 1 million to almost 3 million.
The population of the North was also growing, and political power in Congress shifted from rough parity between North and South to 2:1 in favor of the free Northern states. (Slaves could not vote, of course.) New free states in the North entered the Union. The South saw the expansion of slavery into new states as the only solution to redress what it perceived as a political imbalance. A series of Northern concessions resulted. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise prohibited slavery north of the 36°30' line, but admitted Missouri (which was north of the line) to the Union as a slave state. Arkansas entered as a slave state in 1836, Texas in 1845. The latter event led to war with Mexico, the outcome of which added more than a million square miles of new territory—almost half of which lay below the 1820 line—to the United States. The so-called Compromise of 1850 provided for California’s admittance as a free state but, in return, did not proscribe slavery in the other new territories. The Compromise also called for stricter laws in the Northern states: the Fugitive Slave Act was to ensure the return of runaway slaves to their Southern masters.
Like most Northerners, Olmsted held contradictory ideas about slavery. On the one hand, he believed that slavery was inimical to both the Constitution and to natural law and thought that the new territories of the West should be free states. On the other hand, he was not prepared to risk the Union by calling for the wholesale abolition of slavery in the South. Like many Americans, he sometimes wished the problem would simply go away. He once expressed agreement with his father’s support for the American Colonization Society, whose aim was to resettle freed slaves in Africa. This had been Jefferson’s idea, too, although Olmsted, unlike Jefferson, was not wedded to this position and did accept that freed slaves could become full citizens—eventually. He supported emancipation, but he wanted only gradual emancipation. This attitude reflected more than mere political pragmatism. Olmsted thought that slavery had ill-prepared its victims for citizenship. Freedom was the slaves’ “natural right,” he wrote in Walks and Talks, but it required restoring to them “not the liberty first, but the capacity for the liberty.” He wanted freed slaves to be given liberties when and as they showed they deserved them. He was unclear exactly how long this would take. After all, he had grown up in Connecticut, where, although slavery was prohibited, blacks were still not permitted to vote (only Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts granted suffrage to freed slaves). He found it natural that freed slaves were second-class citizens.
Of course, his contacts with freed slaves—or slaves—were minimal. This was a drawback, for Olmsted always thought clearest when his ideas grew out of personal experience. Lacking that, he sought a conciliatory, middle position in the debate: “I think both sides now very wrong,” he wrote Brace. “The law of God in our hearts binds us in fidelity to the principles of the Constitution,” he wrote in Walks and Talks. “They are not to be found in ‘Abolitionism,’ nor are they to be found . . . in hopeless, dawnless, unredeeming slavery.” It was an awkward argument, as Olmsted himself was the first to admit.
Brace, on the other hand, was a staunch abolitionist. He saw things simply: the federal government should abolish slavery, immediately and universally. He found the Fugitive Slave Act repulsive. “Before, this slavery has rested with the South. Now, it is brought home on our free Northern shoulders,” he wrote to a friend. “We become personally responsible for the slavery of a fellow-being. And I had rather see a dozen Unions broken than do such a wrong.” Such extremism set Brace apart from both the Olmsted brothers and Frederick Kingsbury, who were all moderates. Brace worked hard at converting his “orthodox friends,” as he referred to them. He once brought William Lloyd Garrison, the famous editor of the militant antislavery newspaper The Liberator, to Tosomock Farm for one of the Sunday debates; another time he invited Theodore Parker, an abolitionist preacher. “Why won’t you follow your reason in the Negro Suffrage question?” he demanded of Kingsbury. When John Hull didn’t share his outrage over the Fugitive Slave Act, Brace wrote in exasperation from Germany: “After reading your letter of January 15th on Slave Law, I don’t understand it. I can’t understand it. Does Fred [Olmsted] think so? Do all good men there think so? Is America going to the devil?”
Fred did not think so. He strongly opposed the Fugitive Slave Act. He once wrote that he would be prepared to harbor runaway slaves and “shoot a man that was likely to get them.” He likewise opposed the Compromise of 1850, even though it was brokered by Daniel Webster, whom he admired. On the other hand, he continued to support the Whig party in the 1852 presidential elections. He agreed with Brace that slavery was a curse on the United States, but he was unwilling to declare slave owners immoral. It was not just a question of good versus bad, Olmsted argued. You had to look at both sides of the issue. Thus he pointed out in Walks and Talks that the degraded circumstances of many English farm laborers were often worse than those of American Negroes. This was partly a defensive reaction to British criticism of American slavery, but it did represent his position, that a slave society as existed in the South was not entirely bad. But how do you know that? Brace must have responded. How can you be sure? Have you been there? Have you seen it? Olmsted would have had to admit that he hadn’t.
Perhaps just such a conversation gave Brace an idea. If his friend would see slavery firsthand—and write about it—he would surely change his mind. Moreover, he wanted to get Frederick Olmsted off his farm to “exercise that power” that Brace felt sure he possessed. The opportunity presented itself in mid-1852, when Brace, who moved in literary circles in New York, was talking to Henry J. Raymond, the editor of the New-York Daily Times (later renamed the New-York Times). Raymond, who had started the newspaper only the year before, was looking for a correspondent who would travel in the South and write knowledgeably about the material conditions of its everyday rural life. Slavery was obviously an important issue, but the editor, who was a moderate, did not want an abolitionist who would merely use the series as a platform—he wanted an objective observer. Brace suggested Olmsted. With his Whig views, his farming background, and his travel-writing experience, he would be perfect.
Raymond met Olmsted and offered him the job. Olmsted was thrilled and agreed immediately. As he later recalled, the whole meeting took five minutes. Brace correctly foresaw that the idea of being a “Special Correspondent” would appeal to his friend. It was a chance to combine his two loves: traveling and writing. Equally important, it was a chance to affect the course of the slavery debate. Olmsted was sure that if only he could dig out the facts of the matter, reason would prevail. Here was an opportunity to convince people of the middle course that he favored. Travel in the South could also provide him with valuable material for a book. As he excitedly wrote to Kingsbury, such a book would consist of “observations on Southern Agriculture & general economy as affected by Slavery; the conditions of the slaves—prospects—tendencies—& reliable understanding of the sentiments and hopes & fears of sensible planters & gentlemen that I should meet.” He would leave in December, after the harvest, and travel for several months. Since he would be paid about ten dollars (three hundred dollars in modern dollars) for each article that was published, he reckoned that living cheaply he would come out a few hundred dollars ahead. His nursery business was doing well—he had orders for four hundred dollars’ worth of trees—and the orchards were finally starting to produce. The farm could easily take care of itself during his winter absence, he reasoned. In any case, Brace had volunteered to attend to any pressing business that might arise. There was nothing holding him back.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Yeoman
The Mississippi River, North of New Orleans
Wednesday, February 23, 1853
It is late at night. A steamboat is slowly making its way against the current. Olmsted is on the deck, leaning on the railing, watching the passing water, whose waves and ripples reflect the light from the cabin windows. The sound of the rhythmic
sloshing of the paddle wheels is occasionally punctuated by laughter and conversation from the lounge. It rudely interrupts his reverie. He is happy to be outside, away from the other passengers. He finds them vulgar and boorish, interested only in drinking and card-playing.
But that’s been the pattern of this trip, he thinks ruefully. He has been traveling for more than two months and has met precious few people with whom he can talk. Or, at least, talk intelligently about the subjects that interest him and that he is committed to writing about. Although he carries letters of introduction to several plantation owners, it has proved more difficult than he expected to arrange these visits. In many cases, people are simply not at home. Many are evidently absentee landlords. Frequently, he has been misdirected and spent hours lost on backcountry roads. He has discovered that traveling in the South is not easy. For one thing, the distances are large; this is not England, where a short hike takes you easily from one village to the next. Nor is it Connecticut or New York, with their good roads and effective public transportation. Once south of Virginia, he has found that schedules are rarely adhered to and service is slipshod and makeshift. To his dismay—and discomfort—most of the hotels are as ill-kept and slovenly as their clientele.
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent Page 11